Flyde, Free Online Racing Game

I call this a racing game, but really the only racing that takes place in Flyde, a darling little indie game from Bobblebrook is you racing against your own sadly lacking reflexes.

The premise of the game is simple. You are an arrow traveling at fairly decent speed through a Tron like world. Apparently you're wearing neon spandex, but I see no real evidence of that. All I see after spending a time playing this game is omnipresent failure. You see, unlike other similar games which allow you to buzz around tracks experiencing the thrill of uninhibited digital speed, Flyde shoves obstacles in your path from the get go, obstacles that won't just mess up your score, they'll end your game altogether.

Still, how hard can it be simply to avoid obstacles, huh? Pretty hard when hitting certain colors flips you from racing along the bottom of the track (which makes some kind of sense) to racing along the top of the track in a manner that can only be described as feeling decidedly upside down.

Because you're moving fairly fast and flipping from top to bottom regularly, Flyde is quite a challenge to play. If I were the grand high monster of all game making, I'd have designed an 'easy' option with just one track to play on, but that's mostly because I'm incredibly simple.

What one ends up doing if one doesn't hurl one's mouse out the window in disgust the first few times one slams into a dark block and dies, is trying to memorize the track, which inevitably fails because the track changes every time, which means your efforts at using your brain to overcome the shortcomings of your ability to mash buttons are futile. There's probably a lesson in perseverance somewhere here, but I refuse to acknowledge it.

Graphically, Flyde is nothing super brilliant, but there is a certain amount of slick attention to detail that lets you know somebody spent some time making this game look presentable for you to play. It's pretty much wearing a little neon bow tie and has its hair neatly combed.

The Audio also isn't bad, there are noises that let you know you've managed to survive for another second or two, which is quite helpful and there's a certain old school time to the computer synthesizer voice that urges you onwards, onwards into the dark void.

As a self confessed lazy gamer, I prefer games that entertain rather than challenge, but if you're going out into the great world of gaming in order to try and push yourself to new levels of gaming excellence, and honing your finger / eye coordination, Flyde might just change your life.